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He is sipping coffee and going through a newspaper in the
restaurant when I arrive. Enwezor rises, offers a seat, and tells me to order a
drink. I decline, but he will have none of that. “Not even water? Please order
something.”

2002 was the last time the dean of academic affairs and vice
president at the San Francisco Art Institute, US, visited Nigeria. He is
visiting with members of his family this time and describes the visit as “a
sort of holiday, if it’s really possible to have a holiday in Nigeria in July
and August.”

Modest analysis

Enwezor, who left Nigeria to study Political Science and
Literature in the 1980s before delving into Art History, is one of those
credited with making people aware of African art in the West. The scholar, however,
is reluctant to claim this glory. “It is important for me to be very conscious
of my part, in not ascribing to myself the notion that my work, such as it has
been over the last two decades, has led to an awareness of African art in the
West,” he states.

“The field of contemporary African art, and by extension, modern
African art, has been an important disciplinary area in which I have taught and
I would probably say my works have been part of for a very long time. This
focus, obviously, has generated wide ranging interest by the public in the
West, by institutions and by colleagues who have responded in rigorous ways to
works that I have done or projects that have been generated through efforts
that I have made. I have been enormously privileged to have had the opportunity
to put together exhibitions of the kinds of scale that is not possible for
African curators. There are many African curators working in the field. There
are others who are working and I think that our work, to some extent, can be complementary
even though our focus might not always be the same.

“I’m not just trying to be modest for the sake of modesty, but I
think it’s important that if any analysis is to be done, it’s not a self
analysis that becomes self promotion, self congratulatory. I can say certainly,
between the time that I entered the field and now, a lot has changed in the
field of contemporary African art. An enormous number of artists have entered
into the global contemporary artistic landscape and sometimes, it turns out that
many of these are artists I have worked with directly, whom I’ve commissioned
works for; whom I have showcased in exhibitions or taught their works in
seminars or given lectures about their works.”

Documenta II

Being Artistic Director of Documenta 11 held in Kassel, Germany,
at the relatively young age of 35 can be said to be one of the high points of
Enwezor’s curatorial career so far. Though many would have been overwhelmed by
the task, the first non-European to direct the still talked about edition says
he was pleased and excited but “was also very daunted by the challenge. The
challenge is not so much about Documenta itself, but the proposal that I
presented and how to carry out that proposal because it was rather ambitious.
It had never been done in the history of Documenta; it had never been done in
the history of any large scale exhibition of that kind. But I thought it was a
historical moment for my generation of African curators and writers and so on
that I was only just simply happy to be there. I felt the task was daunting,
not just necessarily because it was Documenta. That in itself was already
daunting but it’s the scope of the project that I wanted to carry out to the
letter that in itself made it really tight.”

Nonetheless, the recipient of the Award for Curatorial
Excellence from the Centre for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, New York, was
able to realise his goals.

“In fact, it went beyond the scope of what I wanted to do. We
did much more than we anticipated because as the project began to coalesce, it
became very clear that there were technological and logistical imperatives that
had to be put to bear in making sure that the project can be diffused,
absorbed, digested and in years going forward, it can be retained as a model
for new kinds of curatorial thinking. I think we succeeded. I will say that I’m
enormously proud of Documenta 11, it had an incredible paradigmatic influence
on subsequent attempts for how the exhibition model can be both expeditionary
but also… This was really one of the innovations that we brought to not only
Documenta but to the larger discourse of contemporary curatorial production.

“What Documenta 11 was about was the challenge of the 21st
century. It was the first Documenta of the 21st century; we didn’t want to look
back, we wanted to look forward. And to look forward, we had to look at the
landmarks and the critical changes that were occurring within the global
landscape and how to make sense of that. So, we came up with the notion that
what Documenta 11 was going to be about was what we called Transparent
Research. It was not going to be mysterious or mythical.”

Interest in history

“I am always very interested in historical issues when I make
exhibitions,” Enwezor offers while revealing what he considers before taking on
any curatorial job. “I’m also very much interested to do exhibitions that are
grounded in what I call both psychic and visual realities. I’m interested in
the idea of the documentary form which is something that was elaborated very
much within the context of Documenta 11. One of my fields of expertise is
photography, and I have made a shot at it in various ways. So, it all really
depends on the going research.”

Meeting Points 6

The next project of the man who curated the 7th Gwangju Biennale
in 2008 and ‘Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art’ in the US
the same year, is called ‘Meeting Points 6′. It will show in nine Middle East,
North African and European cities: Cairo, Tangier, Tunis, Beirut, Aman,
Damascus, Ramallah, Brussels and Berlin. It will start in April 2011 in Beirut
and conclude around February 2012 in Berlin.

“We are working with small scale institutions; we are working
with an institution in Bethlehem, another in Ramallah, a dance theatre in Tunis
and another theatre in Tunis. I’ve invited two young Tunisian choreographers, a
brother and sister, to sort of use the whole city as the stage in which the
project will be realised but what I indicated to them is that the project will
not take place inside a space. It will be within the streets, the narrow alleys
of the city, and so on.”

The research in Amman will be led by a young Jordanian architect
and will take on “the clash of subjectivities. Looking at how notions of the
body is engaged within the urban landscape of the new Islamic city where to be
veiled or not to be veiled is sort of changing the way in which the city itself
is a constant territory of negotiations. We are working in collaboration with a
comic journal which is based in Beirut, to again do a series of works. So, the
curatorial project might not necessarily be only what you see inside but also
what would be outside. But in terms of what you will be seeing inside, I’m
working with tree structures in terms of the exhibition display. Looking at the
exhibition and performative nature of the stage, I’m working with uncompleted
gestures, uncompleted forms to rather than working with performance or
presentation on a stage. We‘ll be working with audition, with rehearsal as a
form. So, it’s always things in progress and we going to be working with
reading rather than presentations.”

Though The Young Arab Theatre Fund directed by Egyptian
architect, Tarek Abou El Fetouh, is sponsoring the project, Enwezor is also
assisting with fundraising. Raising money, he reiterates, is also a core
function of a curator. “A lot of effort goes into making these exhibitions.
Nobody hands you a blank cheque, steps back, and you just simply do it. It
requires a lot of management and diplomacy. There are many different skills that
go into being a curator. It’s beyond just simply selecting artists and making
them stars, that’s really not what a curator does all the time. The curator
does does many other things.”

African art since 1980

Enwezor also reveals why he and fellow art historian and
scholar, Chika Okeke-Agulu, jointly authored ‘Contemporary African Art since
1980′. “We put together this book in response to an enormous gap in the field.
If you wanted to teach contemporary African art in the last 30 years, the only
way you can put it together is by cobbling together your syllabi, two books or
mostly exhibition catalogues many of which do not really explore as exhaustive
as possible for a general audience to understand the field that we are talking
about. And very few of us had access to a comprehensive archive of what had
taken place over the last 30 years. It’s been enormously successful that even
before it came out, it was already in people’s syllabi, they were already
teaching with it and this was the reason why we wrote it. It’s not an edited
volume. It was a project that took three years and few people will actually
believe how difficult it is to write such a book.”

The academic who used to be a poet no longer preoccupies himself with poetry.
Though he recently published five poems in honour of a deceased friend in the
journal ‘Atlantica’, he admits “I can’t be a curator, critic and writer and be
a poet. It [poetry] deserves a lot of attention”

Why art?

I was invited into it when I discovered that every man has a
purpose on earth and that purpose when discovered becomes a calling.

Training

I graduated with distinction in Painting from the famous Art
School, Federal Polytechnic Auchi where I majored in Painting and obtained an
HND (2004). I have participated in several workshops in print making,
photography and the use of found objects in Nigeria and abroad. Notable among
them is the’ Waste to Art’ workshop at the Alliance Franco, Banjul, Gambia; and
the Auchi Artists Convention workshop in Printmaking.

Medium

I work with pastel, acrylic, oil, charcoal, mixed media. I have
always seen myself as an experimental artist not restricted to any medium.

Influences

My mum, my teachers, mentors in art, and all artist.

Inspirations

I draw inspiration from the day to day activities, the news,
people around, my environment, nature, and lastly from every last work I
produce.

Best work so far

The painting on my mind that is yet to be put on a canvas and I
hope it will be the best because every work I produce always looks like the
best until I produce another and realise/feel like it is also the best. But as
long as I keep painting, I don’t think I will ever choose a work to be my best
work.

Least satisfying work

One man’s meal is another man’s poison. I believe in this
philosophy: “there is nothing like a bad art work”.

Career high point

So far, with over 30 group exhibitions to my credit, I will say
it was participating in the Dakar Biennale 2010 with Senegalese Artists, and
Waste to Art workshop in Banjul, Gambia.

Favourite artist

Fela Anikulapo-Kuti.

Ambitions

Whenever the word art is mentioned the name KPODOH should come
to mind. The world will say there lived a man that did his work as if no other
person could do it better.

The deer in our
neighbourhood are racists. They are trying to run my family out of
town. We do not have the money to move to a poor neighbourhood,
otherwise we would move today. We are miserable. What is the problem?
The deer know we are Nigerians. And they know we love bushmeat. So,
they don’t bother us in the daytime. They leave our flowers alone and
they go eat up our white neighbours’ plants. They are smart, they don’t
dare come near us. They can see my firewood, groundnut oil, and cutlass
in the backyard, waiting for foolish meat, who wan die?

One day, my white
neighbours asked me why the deer avoided my flowering plants. I told
them how this tribe of monkeys was always bothering my father’s
vegetable garden until we caught two and had rice and stew with plenty
of monkey meat. They hurried off and never came back, the neighbours I
mean. It was not true of course; we only caught one scrawny monkey.
Getting meat out of the sucker was like raiding a crab for crabmeat; a
lot of work.

I have not seen
the neighbours and their two dogs ever since. We don’t eat dogs, where
I come from. We are ‘civilised’ people. My uncle ate my pet goat once.
It got on his nerves by stealing his one piece of meat and my goat took
the place of his meat. My father consoled me by assuring me that any
goat that ate meat was a witch and needed to be delivered to the
hottest part of hell. Who had ever heard of a meat-chomping goat, my
father asked me, as he chomped on my goat’s head.

My goat was
pretty, you would have liked her. Her name was Goodluck. Don’t ask me
how a female goat became known as Goodluck. I am still traumatised by
that incident. My medical insurance company will not pay for therapy.
They called it a “pre-existing condition”, meaning that I had serious
issues before America granted me a visa. I don’t blame the racist
jerks; hell, coming from Africa is a pre-existing condition. All that
drama.

I have seen a lot
of injustice in my lifetime. I have also been a witness to uplifting,
inspiring stories. One day, right after the end of the Nigerian civil
war, I met this Hausa professor and his monkey, Musa. I noticed that
the monkey had a wooden leg, and he was always nervous around the
professor. Each time Musa spied the owner coming near him, he would
start shrieking and holding on to his wooden leg while exclaiming
“Allah Kiaye! Please don’t eat me!”

I wanted to know
more about this intelligent monkey that spoke Hausa and English. The
owner tearfully shared with me that Musa was a genius; it had saved his
life during the war. Apparently, Musa had a keen sense of sight, smell,
and hearing. Whenever it sensed the rebel army was nearby, it would
blow a whistle and start reciting portions of Shakespeare’s ‘Macbeth’.
That was the cue for his owner to go into hiding immediately. That was
how he survived the war. I was impressed but curious about the wooden
leg. I asked the professor why the monkey had a wooden leg. He looked
at me incredulously and exclaimed: “If your monkey was this valuable,
would you eat it all at once?” I go die o!

We were talking
about racist deer. I am sorry. I tend to ramble, it is a medical
problem. As I was saying before Arogundade the monkey got into the
picture, the deer in our neighbourhood are racists. Why do I say so?
Well, I have incontrovertible evidence to back up my assertions.

We normally take
out our trash bins in the evenings and leave them by the curb for the
trash truck to pick them up in the morning. Well, at night when we are
asleep and not inclined to chase them down for our dinner, the deer
come by and knock down the bins and empty the contents on the streets
for our nosy neighbours to inspect.

We first
discovered the perfidy of these racist deer when we were almost
arrested for murder. Well, when the contents of our trash spilled onto
the streets, there were bones, you know, cow foot, cow leg, isi ewu,
goat head pieces, well scrubbed, I tell you, plus other mainstream
stuff like ogbono, egusi, etc, etc. Our neighbours called the police;
they don’t play with bones around here in America. They were sure they
were human remains.

We were not
arrested, but considered “persons of interest” until they finished
their analysis of the bone fragments in a secret FBI lab in Salt Lake
City, Utah, across from the Mormon temple. Until the results came out,
we did not eat anything Nigerian in our house, just sandwiches and
Lasagne and stuff.

Do you know, once we started eating strange things like that those
bad belle racist deer stopped messing with our trash bins? America is a
tough place.

I travelled to Oguta, in Imo State recently, with a six-member
crew, to hunt for locations for my debut film, The Distant Light, a story that
has been described by German anthropologist, Sabine Jell-Bahlsen, as an
‘Avatar-in-Nigeria thriller.’ Sabine is an authority on Oguta/Oru-Igbo cultures
and traditions and has written one of the most extensive and deeply researched
works on the cosmology of the Igbo gods and goddesses. She spent close to 26
years there, living with the people and learning everything about them. That
culminated in the groundbreaking work of anthropology, “The Water Goddess in
Igbo Cosmology: Ogbuide of Oguta Lake,” published by Africa World Press.

Our paths crossed last year at a women’s conference, where she
was speaking on Igbo traditions and I was giving a speech on why people need to
study other people’s cultures. I found her quite intriguing (for she could
speak Oguta Igbo, always sports Nigerian fabrics and holds a traditional title
in Oguta). And when I finally bought her book, which she autographed, I saw
names of my maternal family members in there, where she had acknowledged the
help they had rendered during her stay in Oguta.

At the beginning of this year, after getting nominated in the
Creative Artist of the Year of the Future Awards, and Adekunle Samuel Owolabi
beat me in that category, we agreed to work together, at least, to ‘cool me
down,’ for bruising my ego. I agreed to produce a script and he will produce a
camera. And we will do a film together.

Bonny Island

I went into solitude at Bonny Island, and believe me; I finished
the first draft within three days. I worked with a self-imposed deadline. On
the fourth day, I left Bonny Island, with a broken heart, a broken pair of
glasses and a completed script, that kept me happy.

This was just after the 2010 AMAA Awards, which I had attended
in Bayelsa. For a lot, the AMAA was motivational and inspirational. For some,
it was an avenue where anyone could face intimidation. Of course, watching
Kunle Afolayan walk up to that stage, smiling and raising his plaques to thank
the world, I felt I could come close. I just didn’t sleep well that night, as I
kept thinking of how many heads he has! “The Figurine”, from every angle, came
close to a perfect work of art.

A friend recently said that critics are like eunuchs in a harem:
they know how it’s done, they have seen how it’s done, but they can’t do it. I
agree. I’ve always being very passionate about the cinema and decided to enroll
into a film school abroad, where I was trained as a scriptwriter and got to
understand that it is easier said than done. So, as a harsh critic of
Nollywood, I take back whatever harsh criticism I made in the past about its
directors and actors. However we want to summarise it, making a film is never
child’s play. It is a battlefield. People die. People live.

Local beliefs

For choosing Oguta as our location to shoot, we have been asked
by the chief priestess, Akuzzor Anozia, after making incantations and
consulting Ogbuide Lake Goddess, that we will perform rituals. Oh, yes, we have
a long list of things to buy after which we will proceed to the Shrine of
Ogbuide to appease her. The consort of the priestess will guide us throughout
the whole period we will spend in Oguta.

For last time I updated my Facebook about Oguta, a friend
commented: “I lost a close friend of mine to the Lake recently. He got drowned
and the [locals] couldn’t let his people take his corpse.” It was no surprise
as my mother used to tell me similar things. When I asked the chief priestess,
she said that if the dead person’s family had performed rituals, they would
have gone with the corpse. I went back to the friend who had commented and she
said, “Yes, they were asked to perform ritual. But it was expensive.”

“The Distant Light” is my take on arrogance and belief. Is
belief necessary for a people? Does arrogance pay? It is my own way of
contributing to Nigerian cinema, with a cast and crew from different parts of
the world. It is my way of saying that we the young people are quick at
condemning the works of the older generation and still cannot do anything to
make changes. This is my way of saying, “Thank you to Tunde Kelani and Kunle
Afolayan” for refining Nigerian cinema, for inspiring a new generation.

Onyeka Nwelue is author of
The Abyssinian Boy. “The Distant Light” will be produced by DADA Films (Lagos);
and KStunts Media (Johannesburg).

Performance poet and Chair of the Association of Nigerian
Authors (ANA) Lagos chapter, Daggar Tolar, had a few things on his mind as he
arrived for the monthly reading of the branch on Saturday, August 14. Held at
the National Theatre, Lagos, the meeting started an hour behind schedule as key
participants, Tolar included, had been held back at the Colloquium being held
on the same afternoon at the University of Lagos for none other than John
Pepper Clark. Some would have wondered: why a clash with the bigger event
organised for Clark by the National executive of ANA? Tolar immediately
provided the answer as the meeting commenced. “We have not been involved in the
programme and detailing (of the Clark Colloquium). If we had been involved,
possibly this forum would have [merged] wit that particular meeting,” he said.

ANA matters

Tolar summarised the key issues discussed at the Clark event for
the benefit of his members, starting with ANA-specific matters which no doubt
preoccupied many in the writers’ body at the other event. The functions of the
ANA branches in relation to the national executive had been discussed by the
many state chairpersons at Unilag and; according to Tolar, the question of a
constitutional amendment had been raised, to be examined at the next national
convention, to be held in Akure, Ondo State.

The question of finances, always a burning topic was also on the
agenda. Many feel the present system, whereby ANA’s Audit Committee does not
meet with branches outside the once-a-year convention, such that there is no
real check on their operation. According to Tolar, “We have left today’s
meeting with a strong position: that we should work towards a constitutional
amendment so that we’ll have a legal framework to raise some of these issues at
the next convention.” The annual ANA awards and the possibility of using them
to engender increased participation by known writers in the activities of the association,
also came up for discussion. Therefore, “there is a thinking, whether it is
possible to have [a requirement that entrants into ANA awards must be active
members] to attract some of these persons. There is a position that we also
need to make a general appeal to known writers to see themselves as being
active members, as being part of ANA.” The challenge of how to attract active
participation by writers, inspired some debate by ANA Lagos members present
later, and several suggestions were made as to how to achieve this.

Clark colloquium

Lagos writers were also given an overview of what had taken
place with regard to the UNILAG event, organised to celebrate J.P Clark but
seen by many to have been far below expectations. “We had a series of discourse
on the work of JP Clark, and for those of us who are familiar with his
writings, he is somebody who has not been fully celebrated in [comparison] to
other icons. These questions were also raised at today’s colloquium,” Tolar
reported. The ANA Lagos chair then went into a spirited discussion of the works
of Clark, also known as Bekederemo. Touching on The Ozidi Saga and the merits
of Clark’s compassionate ‘Abiku’ vis-a-vis Soyinka’s poem of the same title,
Tolar lamented the paucity of the critical appraisal of Bekederemo’s work. Yet,
“Then there is a whole body of poems, which are common to nearly everybody.
There is ‘Night Rain’ which we are all familiar with from the syllabus; there’s
‘Abiku’. If you pick a work like ‘Abiku’…you come up with a humaneness.
Rather than take the part of the Abiku like Soyinka, we meet with a J.P Clark
who prefers to plead on the point of humanity, on the point of the pain that
womanhood has to go through, to suffer the repeated coming and going of an
Abiku.”

Unappreciated

Clark has written great works of literature, no doubt; what is
missing is the full celebration of the man, Tolar suggested, as others have
done. “What reasons should be adjudged for this?” he asked. “I asked this
question at [the] colloquium. Where do we put the blame? Do we put the blame at
the feet of literature, or do we blame it on all of us? Or is it that icons
have already been crowned – Drama, Wole Soyinka; Poetry, Okigbo; Prose, Achebe
– and we frown at crowning a second icon and so we ignore JP Clark and leave it
at that?”

The two-day colloquium held on August 13 and 14 had been ANA’s
way of attempting to redress the balance, Tolar said. Many speakers at the
colloquium had indeed attempted to answer the question of why Clark had not
been properly celebrated for his contribution to Nigerian literature. Ghanaian
poet Atukwei Okai, in his keynote address at the Clark Colloquium had mentioned
publishers and distribution networks as key determinants whether works are
available or not. John Pepper Clark’s books, many of which are out of print,
are a case in point. Tolar informed that the University Press Limited,
publishers of many books by Clark, attended the colloquium and indicated that
there are plan for reprints, a development that would allow more access to the
works. Atukwei Okai, while drawing attention to the rule of the political
economy in creating American ‘bestsellers’ lists while African works go
without, suggested a common African market as a way of getting around the
problem. “A single common African market automatically provides the opportunity
for singular published works to be able to address a bigger African continental
audience,” Tolar surmised. Secretary General of the Pan-African Writers
Association (PAWA), Okai also identified the little regard accorded to culture
and creativity by African rulers as one of the reasons why a persona like Clark
may be have been overlooked.

While Okai’s argument became the “crowning position” at the
colloquium, others suggested that the fault may lie in Clark’s own personality,
for his non-interventionist stance on Nigerian society. For someone who wrote
‘Ozidi’ an early pioneering work on the Niger Delta, it was observed that,
“when you mention the Niger Delta issue today, we do not hear his voice. So there
is a sense in which the absence of his own full intervention in the polity
outside of his literature has not helped.”

Even the ANA itself did not escape censure. Some felt that ANA
itself had botched a great opportunity to honour Clark by its bungling of the
planning for the colloquium, to the dismay of many, including the man being
celebrated.

Readings

Discussion of the Clark After discussions of the fallout of the
Clark Colloquium, the ANA Lagos meeting went into the reading and critiquing
session.

Readings were taken from four writers including Taiwo Oladipupo
Daniel, who rendered his poem, ‘Your mathematical life, our mathematical life’.
The poems ‘Admiration’ and ‘Janus’ by another Lagos writer, generated much
debate. And when it was the turn of Bob Roberts to give his energetic
performance of ‘Take My Life’, no seating was required. Daggar Tolar moved the
chair out of the way for him, to some laughter. ‘I give you a knife/ with it,
take my life/take it along with my wife/take all and end my strife…’ And so
starts Roberts’ poem. The only fiction reading of the afternoon was by this
writer, with an excerpt of the story, ‘Indigo’ from the 2010 Caine Prize
anthology, ‘A Life in Full’.

Deji Toye, a member of the Committee for Relevant Art (CORA),
took the stage after the readings to give a talk on ‘The Dynamics and
Challenges of Managing Literature and the Arts’. Focusing on how to turn art
into an industry, Toye looked at the visual arts, literature and the performing
arts, pointing out ways to create a “value chain” in order to make artistic
endeavour profitable. “The art scene in Nigeria is about to explode,” he
observed, mentioning a recent article in The Economist about Nigerian artworks.
He identified similar opportunities and changes in the marketing of books (with
the advent of E-reader, Kindle and the iPad) and the home video industry.

Toye’s talk led to much spirited debate among ANA Lagos members. The meeting
closed soon afterwards, with a strong sense that writers present had not only
looked at issues affecting their own chapter, but the Nigerian literary body as
a whole. Above all, many who had not attended the Clark colloquium felt like
they had been there, thanks to Daggar Tolar’s fulsome feedback.

No session of modern African poetry is complete without a
reading of the poem titled ‘Ibadan’, by John Pepper Clark-Bekederemo. It is
certainly difficult to escape an encounter with this poem, it being one of the
most anthologized poems ever to come from Africa. It celebrates a city which
is, and was, the champion cradle of literary culture in Nigeria.

The tribe of Nigerian writers recently inaugurated what promises
to be a movable feast in celebration of one of their most gifted in Kiagbodo, the
poet’s place of birth – a feast which then moved to Lagos and is expected to
cast anchor in Ibadan, the physical space that inspired the poem.

Bekederemo’s oeuvre is substantial, copious and varied. Once he
started to write approximately 50 years ago, he never stopped. In the entire
body of his poetic output however, one poem, of five mercurial lines, stands
out for its imagery and energy, its memorability and brevity. The poem also
stands out for being the most definitive poem on any city on the African
continent. In one burst of imaginative efflorescence, a poem of concentrated
power came to be, and to set the standard for poems aspiring to geographical,
intellectual and emotional precision.

Constancy

Why does this particular poem so succeed? We may never really
know. But perhaps because it is a mesh of discernible principles and
techniques, modes of seeing and of thinking, we may essay an explication. I
will argue that the poem succeeds ultimately because it is true. Poetic truth
of the kind I have in mind has been exhaustively treated and defended by
practitioners and critics of the craft from Shelley to C.S Lewis. It suffices
to say that in 50 years, Ibadan the city has remained its running conurbation
of a self, now rust, now gold, a star-crossed creature of the kiln, a child of
the tropic sun. Ibadan the poem has remained as constant as the Northern Star.

The poem, upon first reading, presents itself to the mind of the
as a photograph. But it is more, much more than still photography. It is a
product of a cinematic imagination. In spite of the compressed form of its page
presentation, it is charged with heteroclite energy in every syllable.
Run/ning. Splash. Flung. The sprinter Usain Bolt and all his ancestors come to
mind… watch the golden burrs latch on to them, from Bubastis to Sokoto, in
ultra-slow motion.

To borrow the language of physics, the poem appears as a scalar
quantity, with evidently measurable (and apparently miniscule) magnitude. In
actuality, the poem behaves as a vector. It is a vehicle capable of traveling
in multiple directions.

Opinion varies on whether this poem is a lyric or an epic. There
are powerful arguments and rebuttals on both sides of the opinion divide,
arguments which the poet appears to anticipate in the central binarism in the
poem itself. Another excursion to the field of physics proves useful in
essaying a plausible explanation of the phenomenon of Ibadan. For a long time,
physicists differed on whether light was particle or wave. Eventually it was
realised that light is actually a particle/wave duality. While direct
transpositions rarely work, I submit nevertheless that the enigma of Ibadan is
in reality a lyric/epic mesh, it breathes the air of both realms and the
geographic space it represents bears this witness out as true.

Immortal poem

Bekederemo, within the first line of Ibadan, harks back to
Homer, Chaucer, Basho and Pound – and blazes forward into a space that the
present generation of poets can confidently claim for its own. In many ways,
Ibadan is Bekederemo’s hugely successful optical experiment. If today
contemporary poets on the continent see with greater clarity, they ought to
acknowledge, with gratitude, the prism of Pepper Clark.

The poem challenges the oft repeated cliché that the map is not
the territory. Where the map is mere cadastral representation, no doubt, this
may very well be the case. But the power of poetry lies precisely in this: that
it is always more than words and the accumulation of words; always more than figures
and their combinations. Poetry defies equations and the very extremes of
topologic computation. When Pepper Clark wrote Ibadan, not only was an immortal
poem born, but a city also ascended to its place amongst the cities of the
world. Africa got its own city equal to Madrid, Tokyo, London and New York.

These are concepts which the merely photographic cannot
generate, cannot contain.

Bekederemo’s mind is superbly suited to accommodating these. His
is an estuarine frontier, elastic and deep. It is a littoral expanse in which
both flora and fauna lay equal claim to saltwater and fresh. It is a realm
annotated with buried treasures, a psychic space of bare and peopled islands.
See that mind at work in ‘Agbor Dancer’ and ‘Night Rain’.

Lyrical

This poem is one reason why, in a generation that produced an
Okigbo, a Soyinka and an Okara, J.P Clark was rated the most lyrical of the
poets of his generation by the Encyclopedia Britannica. It is one reason why,
today, when I teach creative writing, I never lack an exemplar worthy of the
continent.

Because Ibadan, the city, was settled by gregarious rebels from
all over the old Yoruba nation, its hills were both havens and look-outs. For a
long time, there were little de-militarised spaces and it was a city of the
gauntlet in all the senses of that word. Ibadan the poem contains that essence
of the challenge thrown.

Ibadan, the poem, is a feat of poetic intensity capturing the circadian
rhythms of a continent’s cultural capital in five fluid lines. It is a worthy testament
of a poetic mind at the height of its powers. Today, in my own 40 year to
heaven, I can better appreciate why, in his earliest interventions in my
artistic education, my father, himself a mature student of literature, set
before me the examples of a J.P Clark and a W.B Yeats. Both poets have written
splendidly, but I live in Ibadan, not Dublin, and, green with envy as any poet
should be that Bekederemo wrote Ibadan first, I am glad that he did and that
because he did, I can set a poem of my own city as standard before my children.
And urge them on to gold.